Jenny Sussinhttp://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin
A Member of The Gartner Blog NetworkMon, 17 Oct 2016 15:08:31 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.3.6Social Media Monitoring – Or Is It Surveillance?http://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/2016/10/17/social-media-monitoring-or-is-it-surveillance/
http://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/2016/10/17/social-media-monitoring-or-is-it-surveillance/#commentsMon, 17 Oct 2016 15:08:31 +0000http://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/?p=1020Over the last week, there have been a series of articles dumping on one particular social media monitoring application that was allegedly using an unethical value proposition to market its solution: surveillance.

As one of Gartner’s social analytics analysts I’ve got to tell you, the tools that each vendor offers to the market could allow the exact same type of use. This isn’t in defense of any vendor nor is it meant to accuse any vendor or anything, this is just the fact of the matter. I’ve long told people that the data feeds that social analytics vendors access are not the differentiator in the social analytics equation, rather the way in which the vendor chooses to focus and present their analysis, is.

In the case of the vendor in question, they choose to plot the returns to their clients’ social media data queries on a map – but they’re not the only ones who do that. So if a vendor provides the tools, and a client chooses to use those tools in a way which is unethical, whose fault is it?

Is it the social network who hands over our information via an API – despite its terms and conditions of API use specifically noting that its data can not be used for individual surveillance?

Is it the vendor who provided the tools to spin that information into a dashboard where it could be used for surveillance?

Is it the client who chose to watch individuals’ posts?

It’s not like companies watching individuals over social media is something new. Marketers watch “influencers” all of the time. Sales people watch what their prospects and customers talk about to try and find an opening. I don’t mean to imply this is the same thing as surveilling protesters, but don’t influencers, prospects and customers have rights as well? Where is the line?

]]>http://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/2016/10/17/social-media-monitoring-or-is-it-surveillance/feed/2WhatsApp Removes Wall to Businesses – Businesses Pop Champagnehttp://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/2016/08/30/whatsapp-removes-wall-to-businesses-businesses-pop-champagne/
http://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/2016/08/30/whatsapp-removes-wall-to-businesses-businesses-pop-champagne/#commentsTue, 30 Aug 2016 12:35:41 +0000http://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/?p=1007Over the last week or so, there have been a lot of news articles flying around about WhatsApp being open for businesses and businesses are losing their collective minds with excitement.

Before we get into WHY this is the reaction, let me explain what the status quo was before this announcement.

PRIOR TO this update to their terms of service, WhatsApp told businesses that they were not allowed to use their application for commercial purposes: advertising, commerce, customer service…This was a big deal as WhatsApp is the most widely used consumer messaging application on a global scale and they weren’t allowing businesses to engage with customers as apps like WeChat, LINE and Kik were.

WHY did businesses care? If you’re a client, you may have already seen our research on what businesses are doing with consumer messaging apps to engage customers.

If not, you should know that we expect that by 2019, requests for customer support through consumer mobile messaging apps will exceed requests for customer support through traditional social media. So now think of the hundreds of millions of dollars spent every year on social customer service…and then think about how heavily invested companies are going to be in messaging apps like WhatsApp. The sooner they can get started, the better!

HOWEVER – this announcement from WhatsApp is being misinterpreted a bit and we should provide clarity on two things:

WhatsApp has NOT released an API for companies to more easily connect.

WhatsApp contacts and Facebook contacts are not being merged. WhatsApp cohort activity is going to be used to further inform Facebook cohort activity to help make targeted advertising hit the groups they are really aimed at.

With that in mind…pop champagne, just don’t go crazy.

]]>http://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/2016/08/30/whatsapp-removes-wall-to-businesses-businesses-pop-champagne/feed/2Pokemon Go is Giving to Society What Other Technology Had Taken Awayhttp://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/2016/07/12/pokemon-go/
http://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/2016/07/12/pokemon-go/#commentsTue, 12 Jul 2016 11:19:39 +0000http://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/?p=998I’m smack dab in the middle of Pokemon Go‘s target demographic.

I’ve seen some funny memes online where a big scary van has graffiti’ed “Rare Pokemon Inside” on it with the caption, “How to kidnap a 28 year old in 2016,” and I can tell you, that is accurate. I’m sitting at my desk in the office and there is a Squirtle near by and every ounce of me wants to leave this chair and go find him.

I spent the entire weekend walking. I went to a park I’ve never been to before, walked to the grocery store twice, and stood outside of a church with a total stranger because it was a Pokemon gym and we were trying to take it over.

I’ve shouted out my car window at strangers and held my phone up in the air as they did, laughing. I spoke to a guy in my office building that I’ve seen a thousand times before and never said a word to, because he saw I was catching a Seaking CP 400+ in our office parking lot. I talked to a group of teenagers outside of the mall who told me there were some good Pokemon near by.

I was outside, I was talking to actual people, we were helping each other build an experience that was exclusively ours: the people who play Pokemon Go.

Pokemon Go, is not just “augmented reality” but it appeals to a nostalgia that speaks to a certain group of people who grew up with the show/cards/Nintendo game. Teenagers are into it too, and that is not surprising, but you have ADULTS who are usually sitting around all day, working or watching Netflix, out and about playing this game.

AR, when done right, has the ability to bring people back outside where we exercise and engage with other humans, face-to-face. Has it given back what other technology has taken away…?

]]>http://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/2016/07/12/pokemon-go/feed/1Why The Acquisition of LinkedIn Annoys LinkedIn Usershttp://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/2016/06/15/why-the-acquisition-of-linkedin-annoys-linkedin-users/
http://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/2016/06/15/why-the-acquisition-of-linkedin-annoys-linkedin-users/#commentsWed, 15 Jun 2016 18:32:47 +0000http://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/?p=991Your data is for sale. It’s something we’ve all known for a while now but $26.2 billion later the conversation has been reignited, if not a bit buried, in the story of Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn.

Ironically, news of the intent to acquire hit while I sat in the keynote for Gartner’s Security and Risk Summit where I am in attendance to talk about customer expectations for data privacy. About six months back, a colleague and I started delving into the topic of customer data privacy expecting to write a research note on customers’ concerns with the over 750 data breaches that occurred last year in the US. Getting to the ironic part, what we found is that while security professionals scramble to secure their data from being hacked, the majority of customers are more concerned (~80% to ~30%) that the information they voluntarily share with companies is being resold or used in a way that they had “no knowledge” of.

I put “no knowledge” in quotation marks because we are signing away the rights to our digital interaction data daily by clicking the “I agree” text boxes at the bottom of licensing agreements so that we can hurry up and access the latest application everyone is talking about.

Legally, we consumers have agreed to share just about everything with just about everyone, so why do people get so bent out of shape when they think of a company like Microsoft having direct access to the data we’ve been populating LinkedIn with?

Whether users knew it or not, LinkedIn was a fairly closed off social network.

If organizations wanted access to spins of LinkedIn data, they needed to purchase one of LinkedIn’s enterprise solutions. This is a lot different than what it’s like to work with Facebook’s free page API or Twitter’s public API that limits data volume but not access to specific types of metadata. The acquisition of LinkedIn by Microsoft means access to the social profile and networking data of over 400 million professionals who use the social network. Are those profiles alone worth $26.2 billion? Don’t think so highly of yourself

But even though we’re not worth about $60 a pop, doesn’t mean that users aren’t concerned with what this acquisition might mean for the future of the preferred professional social network. Microsoft and LinkedIn’s joint plans make mention of the development of an economic graph, the synergy of the graph data both companies have built to better identify employee skills gaps, and the general blending of external social profiles and internal productivity applications.

At the end of the day, if LinkedIn doesn’t clearly remain a distinct entity in more ways than name, we’ll have a lot of annoyed LinkedIn users questioning if this is what they signed up for.

]]>http://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/2016/06/15/why-the-acquisition-of-linkedin-annoys-linkedin-users/feed/9Who Ruined Social Media?http://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/2016/04/28/who-ruined-social-media/
http://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/2016/04/28/who-ruined-social-media/#commentsThu, 28 Apr 2016 12:55:07 +0000http://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/?p=977Someone asked me about Twitter’s stock price the other day to which I replied: I know nothing of stocks, but I’ll happily tell you who I think is ruining it for all of us. Let’s have some straight talk about who is ruining Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook

Embarrassing parents ruined Facebook. Sorry, but they did.

Years back when people outside of colleges were granted access to Facebook, us college folk were more concerned about high school kids getting access to our “privilege.” I remember there being a Facebook group that was actually entitled, “Facebook is a college privilege, not a high school right,” or something of the sort.

I don’t know that any of us thought our parents might actually join Facebook, nor did we think they’d post our baby pictures on our birthday, or write novels on our pages singing our praises for the world to see…

Now, as a self-proclaimed adult, I think that all of that is actually adorable. Imagine the pride someone would need to have in knowing they helped raise a somewhat well-balanced human! However, when you’re somewhat between 14 and 20 you really don’t need the extra social anxiety that comes with people knowing that you took ballroom dance classes in middle school or dressed in matching outfits with your siblings.

This picture is so adorable, I think I may have posted this to show how adorable I was.

Twitter

Marketers ruined Twitter. Just for kicks, I pulled up my Twitter home feed as I write this and removing companies I follow from this count, 5 of the 10 PEOPLE I am following are self-promoting + another 1 of the 10 is an advertisement.

*I can’t put a screenshot in here.*

Perhaps it’s a reflection of who I follow, but I don’t think I am alone in seeing this type of continuous self-promotion in my Twitter home feed. Now mind you that as I say this I will undoubtedly post a link to this blog post on Twitter and LinkedIn…but it’s not the only thing I post. Some of the “marketers” out there have told me I am not using Twitter appropriately because I don’t solely post about work. GOOD RIDDANCE!

You’re telling me that *this* is not on par with my persona as a social media analyst?

And now for the educational portion of this blog post…why does this matter? Well, ever wonder why “the kids” are moving toward applications like Snapchat or WhatsApp or any other mobile messenger? It’s to get away from their parents and companies and people who make Twitter the new Times Square with the amount of advertising being spewed. Luckily for Facebook, kids tend to grow out of the embarrassment of being praised and adored by their parents.

]]>http://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/2016/04/28/who-ruined-social-media/feed/4What is “Better” When It Comes to Software?http://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/2016/04/13/what-is-better-when-it-comes-to-software/
http://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/2016/04/13/what-is-better-when-it-comes-to-software/#commentsWed, 13 Apr 2016 12:35:29 +0000http://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/?p=967I remember being back in ninth grade English when my teacher taught our class the importance of communication skills. She said that if we couldn’t put into words how we felt, thought or viewed the world, then we would never be able to get our point across and ultimately get what we wanted. Now, that is a somewhat harsh reality for a group of 14 year olds (I realize as I am writing this…) but years later I see that she was absolutely right.

Since starting with Gartner almost five years ago, I have been briefed on application solutions by over 300 vendors and multiple times by many of them. I would say I see at least 5 presentations and demos of new or updated products each week from around the world. The number of times a week that I hear, “we’re the only,” “the best, “better than…” is startling. I can’t imagine having so many “better”s out there in the world – it’d be a circus.

After sitting through a technically impressive briefing this week, I have been thinking to myself: how can you explain why this is “better” to your clients? What I realized is that despite technical superiority, I don’t know that clients would consider what I saw to be “better.” For them, “better” isn’t about technical prowess so much as the tools ability to help them do the task they’ve been assigned with more efficiently or accurately. “More efficiently” honestly doesn’t cut it either for our clients. They want to know if this cuts down on the time it takes them to produce a weekly report, etc.

The lessons of ninth grade all come flooding back to me when I sit through these briefings. “Better” is only “better” if it addresses the specific business need of a person in a specific business role – and if you can’t communicate “better” in that sense then no matter how technically advanced your application is, it’ll never be “better” than anyone else’s.

For years – clients have been calling us about social analytics and for years their excitement had been rooted in a particular type of analysis: sentiment analysis.

The promise was that social sentiment analysis could give organizations real time insight into how people felt about a particular marketing campaign, a brand in general, or the customer service they had received. The standard sentiment analysis tools allowed for organizations to see whether social posts were considered to be positive, negative or neutral and more complex tools broke up sentiment into passion and emotion. Additional complexities were addressed – like parsing out phrases within a single post to determine whether one subject of the post was positive while another was negative, without the post being tagged as a resultant neutral.

But some of the largest organizations in the world, working off of some of the most renowned social analytics tools, seem to have soured on social sentiment analysis.

Image by Ryan McGuire

According to these organizations, largely represented by their market insights teams, they discourage their employees and their executives use of sentiment analysis as a definitive measure of success or failure. They say that despite having used multiple tools over the years – and I’m talking the tools which are largely considered to be the leaders in the social analytics space – they have never found sentiment analysis to be particularly accurate.

Image by Ryan McGuire

Perhaps it’s the fault of these vendor’s NLP algorithms, perhaps it’s the simple truth that even people won’t agree on the sentiment of a social media post 100% of the time. It could be western society’s penchant for sarcasm, it could be that there are too many industry specific terms that no vendor could have so many taxonomies for. Maybe our sampling of social data is too biased! Is it our problem for interpreting it wrong or expecting it to work on it’s own without any context? The fact of the matter is that this area has been a massive disappointment to clients and reference customers alike.

Image by Ryan McGuire

If you’re reading this thinking, “well no, it worked for me…” I would love to hear from you in the comments or at my email address jenny.sussin@gartner.com if you need to keep your comments off the record.

Similarly, let me know if you haven’t seen success here and what you think the drivers behind that problem are.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

]]>http://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/2016/02/26/the-disappointment-of-social-sentiment-analysis/feed/2The Internet Isn’t Freehttp://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/2015/12/04/the-internet-isnt-free/
http://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/2015/12/04/the-internet-isnt-free/#commentsFri, 04 Dec 2015 16:01:50 +0000http://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/?p=937I’ve recently embarked on a new line of research (for me, not for the world) on customer data privacy. In doing so, I’ve read synthesized versions of about 20 reports, watched some documentaries and have looked into some of the commentary on ridiculously long terms of service. What it all leads up to is the importance for the average person to realize this: the internet isn’t free.

It costs Jenny Bucks…

I know some of you are thinking, “I pay a huge cable/internet bill each month, I know it isn’t free;” but realistically you’re paying for the infrastructure – not the content.

So content creators and hosts like Google, Facebook and Amazon take payment from you in data. Data which helps them sell better advertising or serve up recommendations that will keep you on their site to consume more information/produce more data or buy something. Your data is their money maker…which sounds a lot like what my colleague Doug Laney has been saying for years about “infonomics” and eerily similar to that time RadioShack wanted to sell its customer data.

I’m not saying this is fair, but I am saying that it is less unfair than most people make it out to be. From a privacy perspective, 80% of 20 to 40 year old adults in the US and UK have it right: total privacy in the digital age is a thing of the past.

I’ve been conducting a lot of reference checks of late, searching through the case studies of vendors in the space, and talking to Gartner clients about what it is they’re measuring when it comes to social media and continue to find that the majority of companies are STILL not measuring anything that shows business impact.

The #mondaymorningselfie of mine which most accurately represents how I feel about all of this.

Five years ago, everyone in the space had a pass – the tools were not there to help us get this stuff done – but now, come on!

Listen, we all have lazy moments…(not an endorsement for Remo’s.)

Now saying, “it’s difficult to tell” is just an excuse. It’s an excuse not to put in the time to work across your organization to gain access to the data you need to determine whether or not your social media efforts have had an impact on the business. I say all of this knowing that while it is hard to work across an organization to get the data you need, it is not impossible because there are companies who have done it.

Relative activity* (*This one still needs to be tied to a business objective.)

Who is doing this well?

Every year, we publish a piece of research called, “Top Use Cases and Benefits of Social for CRM in 201X” which gives examples of companies who have demonstrated a ROI from their social media efforts. While I work to refresh the document for 2016, here are some examples from 2015’s document:

The Palms Hotel in Las Vegas works with Hootsuite, Media Leaders and Google Analytics to measure the success of its social media campaigns by tracking room bookings back to individual social media posts. In the course of one month, it attributed $903 of revenue back to a single Facebook post; exceeded its campaign revenue goals by 67%, earning more than $5,000 from social media-driven bookings; and exceeded its room rate reservation goal by 47%. (Source)

PayPal Australia uses LinkedIn’s enterprise solution, Sales Navigator, to help its Field Sales team identify and engage leads on LinkedIn. Rather than acquiring leads through heftier data sources, PayPal’s team has been able to quickly identify the right contact at a prospect organization with just a company name. The head of field sales at PayPal Australia estimates that the company’s $10,000 investment in LinkedIn Sales Navigator brought in at least $300,000 in new business during its first year and reduced sales cycle times by an average of 25%. (Source)

Kia Motors in the U.K. employed ratings and reviews on its site to increase credibility via the impartiality of a third party. Using Reevoo’s managed product ratings and reviews, the company saw the booking of test drives increase by 300% when reviews were read, as well as a 280% increase in the average time spent on the company’s site. (Source)

The example companies and technology vendors cited are just a sampling of work that has been done across industries, across providers and across use cases. The point is to show that whether you’re B2C or B2B, whether you’re in the US or Australia, it is possible to put your social media efforts into terms which reflect business impact.

I welcome any stories of success from folks managing social media within their organization, or providers who have stories along these lines.

]]>http://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/2015/11/23/the-roi-of-social-media-still-a-lack-of-measurement/feed/2Social Media in Your Customer Journeyhttp://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/2015/10/12/social-media-is-rarely-the-destination-in-your-customer-journey/
http://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/2015/10/12/social-media-is-rarely-the-destination-in-your-customer-journey/#commentsMon, 12 Oct 2015 14:40:20 +0000http://blogs.gartner.com/jenny-sussin/?p=907Coming off of Gartner’s US Symposium, I am adding my notes from the 40+ client 1:1 meetings I had into the system and seeing a pattern in the conversations I had.

A few months ago, we wrote a research doc (behind the Gartner pay wall) on “How to Determine the Role of Social Media in Your Customer’s Journey” to note a major divide in the way clients were thinking about social media. Clients were either thinking of social media as a destination for their customers to consume content and engage, or a facilitator for their customers to take another action.

While social media can certainly be the destination in many use cases – peer to peer community support, social commerce (particularly ratings and reviews and social network selling,) it’s more often not the place where clients want their customers to stop interacting with them. THAT is where the major disconnect is in the development of the corporate social media strategy of 2015. Clients are focusing completely on content development and dropping the ball on identifying what role social media is meant to play in the larger customer journey.

I encourage you to question why you’re doing what you’re doing on social media. If it’s “increasing brand awareness,” ask yourselves what a customer is supposed to do on or off of social media now that they are aware of your brand, and ask if you’re helping them get to that next step. If it’s “increase engagement,” ask yourselves why? Make sure that whatever it is you are doing, you’re cognizant of the next action you’d like customers to take and check yourself: are you helping them get there?